In distributed application configurations, the client-server architecture provides a convenient way to a user for accessing applications deployed on a server. These applications are adapted to manage and track enterprise processes in an enterprise. The user may access the application through a client machine such as a laptop, from a remote location via a network. The client-server architecture further facilitates the user to access different resources available on the server without deploying such resources on the user's laptop. In one aspect, the resources may comprise a subset of data stored on the server for processing the subset of data. In certain scenarios, the user may need to access the applications from the remote location where no network connectivity is available which eventually hinders the user to access the business applications and also the available resources. This may affect in controlling the overall execution of the enterprise processes.
One example of the enterprise processes facilitating such client-server architecture, may be auditing of the products being insured by an enterprise to various insurers. In such scenario, an audit application may be installed on a computing system carried by an auditor who is responsible for conducting audit of insurers by visiting the insurers' location.
In order to facilitate effective premium calculations, the auditor may utilize auditing application installed on the computing system. These auditing applications are traditional spreadsheet based applications comprising embedded resources such as macros and VB screens that facilitate filling and validation of the data entered by the auditor for conducting the auditing process. However, these applications are error-prone, complex and onerous. For example, the spreadsheet based applications may involve multiple tabs which the auditor has to fill in, which when filled by the user instantiate dynamic creation of new tabs which further adds to complexity of the application. Further, the spreadsheet based application uses low level MS-Excel data security due to which data corruption and data mismatch are frequent that further leads to generation of IT support tickets to fix the data mismatch. Such data mismatch may occur due to lack of clarity or oversight from the auditors' perspective towards altering or updating the MS-Excel formulas and logic.
The audit applications further requires the auditor to perform the audit in the offline mode that needs to sync the spreadsheet based application with the server. In order to synchronize, a set of batch jobs are run to extract content from the spreadsheet based application and then convert them into a format that is recognized by a database located on the server. However, such data synchronization is prone to delays and lags which subsequently slows down the overall audit process.